Beside the Straight and Narrow

I was intrigued by the certainty that marked the evangelical faith and I did encounter lively and energetic worship services and met many good people in evangelical church communities. Sometimes, I recognized the kind of peace, the freedom from internal contradictions described in the Timeless Way with people that were a perfect fit for the prescribed patterns. I also wanted to give due diligence to the claims of evangelicals, that if they are right, I’d be in eternal trouble.

More often, though, I was made keenly aware of the deep canyons only a step to each side of the straight and narrow path, filled with sharp rocks, possibly noxious fumes, demons and their condemned human minions who would like nothing better than pull me into a life of eternal torment. I viscerally felt fear of the other and with it the brittleness of the construct.

In those contexts, the only approved contact with “outsiders” was in the context of “winning their souls for Christ” which meant conversion to the evangelical way. The boundaries were clarified in the statements of faith, in Sunday sermons, and daily television programs and books about the end times.

As a declared atheist at the time, I thought I should have encountered some of these perilous landscapes and dangerous creatures on my wanderings off the beaten path in current day “godless Europe” . However, my experience more closely matched the descriptions of life-giving places in Alexander’s book. I would meet friends at street cafe’s naturally spilling into the foot traffic of the cobblestone clad pedestrian zones, easily connecting with acquaintances who were passing by. I would hike up to the ruins of castles representing a much harsher time and picnic at volunteer-run cabins in the surrounding woods. This culture felt much more spacious and alive than the restrictive and fearful one I encountered in many US churches.

Growing up in Europe in the 70s and 80s, I did encounter places and people that matched the descriptions of the depths of depravity feared by evangelicals outside the church walls. I found it in the history books of the 20th century, monuments of remembrance, films like Schindler’s List or Sophie Scholl, and concentration camps we visited all throughout our middle and high school experience.

Every day on the way to school we passed a charred monument to the local synagogue that had been burned down during the Nazi pogroms. We spent a lot of time learning about the Nazi regime, the participation of ordinary citizens who needed scape goats for the economic crises of the 1920s, and the horrors of the holocaust for Jewish people, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, off-white and brown people and anyone who disagreed with those in power .

We were so inundated with messages of remembrance and collective guilt that many of us in our teenage rebellion thought “enough already” and “our generation didn’t do it”. No one would ever be so stupid and depraved to repeatedly elect governments that would do commit such atrocities in the name of an obviously delusional ideology of superiority of one race one nation and reverence for one god-like person. The patterns of delusion, disgust with others who are not like us, projection of our own inequities and fears onto those on the margins appeared to be so obvious that no one should ever fall for them again as these patterns are ultimately self-destructive but not before wreaking havoc on the people and places they touch.

To my great surprise the people featuring prominently in the lists of enemies of God, humanity and the American way in the minds of the evangelical preachers and conservative politicians were the same marginalized groups persecuted and murdered by the Nazi regime and betrayed by ordinary German citizens. The cognitive dissonance I felt then and still feel now in these contexts is immense.

It’s not completely impossible that my own depravity blinded me to the fact that non-believers, LGBTQ+ people of any kind and those not voting Republican are probably not going to join evangelicals in the rapture but it seemed at least questionable that a loving God would side with Hitler on destroying us. My ace in the hole was that I did in fact earnestly seek Truth and what I found in evangelical theology and politics did not match up with self-emptying and humble God of the gospels.

What drew me in about the Timeless Way of Building is that it speaks about the act of human creation in a very unusual and very compelling way. It speaks of a quality that is objective and precise but cannot be named because there is not one word to fully encapsulate it. It speaks of a method that frees us from all methods and produces buildings and systems that are truly natural in their context.

Describing the quality requires many words that overlap with the quality but ultimately fail to fully express it because they are overloaded with other meanings or miss a crucial element of this quality of timelessness. It’s a “you know it when you see it” kind of quality. It’s eminently accessible and recognizable. It emerges from a multitude of ordinary events and actions. It is generative and self-maintaining. It’s the easy grace of a space at once at rest and alive. All internal forces are accounted for and in perfect balance.

It can readily be encountered in the wilderness but can also be present in the built environment and in people. It is present in can be trees bending in a wind storm. Both wind and trees are fully true to their nature and yet they are in balance and the strength of the storm does no violence to the trees. It may be the interior of a temple that conveys a sense of awe, reverence, rest and peace. It may be a person who is fully comfortable in their own skin and fully present to the people around them. It may be a poem or a song that expresses something true and eternal. It may be a Japanese garden that is constructed by man but feels as if it had always been there.

The expression of the quality is unique in every instance because it takes the shape of the particular space or person it inhabits. It is a subtle kind of freedom from inner conflict, when all forces and events at play in it are fully expressed and yet in balance. A system (thing or person) with the quality is alive like waves on the seashore, a well built fire or a tiger are fully alive. Another word that approximates but not fully captures the quality is wholeness. The more free of inner contradictions a system is, the more healthy and whole it is, yet it is not finite or isolated.

It is comfortable, in the sense that everything in the system has its place and function and can be accessed and enjoyed readily without strain, yet so sheltered that it deadens the senses. It is free in the sense that it appears to have been created not with a specific image in mind but created with abandon as its nature required. It is exact in that even small forces that have not been accounted for can throw off the balance could cause internal conflicts but it not an exact match to any external image or design. It is egoless, in that it is true to its own nature rather than that of its maker. It is eternal in the sense that the person, building or space is so present that it is hard to imagine a time when it wasn’t there, or that it would ever be destroyed. It is truly natural.

We are a people that values freedom but we have lost access to our innate sense for what truly makes us free. When we say freedom today, we usually mean our ability to do and get what we want. Ironically, true freedom comes when we have nothing to lose, live up to, or protect including our own ego. In the same way the timeless way requires that we as builders give up any external images and help our systems emerge from the natural forces within its components and their interactions in their context.

Despite my best efforts and the efforts those speaking the loudest in the US religious context to disqualify Christianity as a viable path to life, I could not shake the suspicion that the Timeless Way of Building had touched on the quality of the Kingdom of God Jesus talks about in the Sermon on the Mount. According to that scripture we have to become poor in spirit, that is to let go of our own conceptions and images, our false selves, before we can become co-creators in the timeless realm.

All the great Wisdom traditions circle around the same ineffable quality in their parables and kuans that have no resolution in an either-or context. They require us to go through a process of self-emptying (kenosis) in order to allow forces in these paradoxical stories to come into balance at a higher level of awareness where we can celebrate the both-and reality of this world.

Kenosis is the process by which we rid ourselves of harmful patterns of being and it is what allows us to reconnect to our life-giving center. We will be able to recognize the quality with no name in ourselves and others and collaborate in building a world that expresses it well.